Tag Archives: kimberly perry

The Band Perry will release new album “Pioneer” on Tuesday, and Kimberly Perry says, “it’s everything we’ve been thinking about and experiencing since we released our debut album.”

“Our whole worlds have changed,” she says. “The personal landscape. The professional landscape. We talk about a lot of different emotions in ‘Pioneer,’ all very true stories.”

And they had some outside help crafting those stories. The band, most known for four-time platinum single “If I Die Young,” spent much of 2012 on tour with Brad Paisley. Band Perry members co-wrote “Forever Mine Nevermind,” a song on “Pioneer,” with Paisley.

The Band Perry’s new album “Pioneer” will be in stores Tuesday, but it’s not the only sweet treat fans can expect from the trio in the coming days.

Gigi’s Cupcakes has named a cupcake after the band — The Very Perry Chocolate Cherry — a name and flavor inspired by a song on “Pioneer.” In “I’m a Keeper,” the girl in the song wants to change her name to Cherry.

“I’ve always wanted Cherry to be my name,” says Kimberly Perry. “That girl in ‘The Outsiders,’ Cherry Valance, she’s always been one of my favorite heroines in literature. So the cupcake was named after the song and we got to taste test.”

The band even had a hand in developing the flavor profile. They were presented with two cupcakes, a chocolate covered cherry flavor and a yellow cupcake filled with cherry pie filling.

“We kind of combined the two of them,” says Reid Perry. “That was another thing on our bucket list, a cupcake.”

The Very Perry Chocolate Cherry is a white cupcake sweetened and colored with maraschino cherry juice with chopped cherries inside and topped with mounds of chocolate frosting and a cherry. The Perry’s cupcakes will be available at Gigi’s Cupcakes Fridays and Saturdays starting in a couple weeks.

The Band Perry is gearing up to release their sophomore album “Pioneer” on April 2 and the collection will hit stores with the sibling trio’s latest platinum-selling multi-week No. 1 “You Better Dig Two” as an anchor.

The celebration was much-needed reassurance for the trio who were initially concerned the song wouldn’t be embraced by their fans or the genre.

“We debuted ‘Better Dig Two’ the night of the CMA Awards and that was a nerve racking day,” recalls Kimberly Perry. “We were sweating bullets just hoping that not only our fans but the country music world would get what we wanted to do next. ‘Better Dig Two’ has been a huge boost of confidence.”

With its eerie, charged music and dark obsessive lyrics that include, “So if the ties that bind ever do come loose/ Tie 'em in a knot like a hangman's noose,” the writers say they were “floored” when The Band Perry recorded the song. Instead they thought Miranda Lambert or Carrie Underwood might be the first to scoop it up. But, Clark, McAnally and Rosen are not complaining.

“It’s not a huge departure (for them),” says McAnally. “You believe them. It fits the evolution of what they’re doing. I’m just glad they’d take a chance on a song like that.”

Kimberly Perry describes “Better Dig Two” as having “the most teeth of anything we’ve put out yet” and says it’s “the ultimate love song but written over a very aggressive bed of music.”

Neil Perry says the song is “a good example of what people will hear on the new album. The music is aggressive but the lyrics are vulnerable. You’ll see those two sides on ‘Pioneer.’”

Hunter Hayes performs Thursday night at the 46th annual CMA Awards at Bridgestone Arena. Click here to see a photo gallery from the event. (photo: Larry McCormack / The Tennessean)

All eyes were on new artist of the year award winner Hunter Hayes as he serenaded adoring fans during his first CMA Awards performance on Thursday.

All except Erica Edmondson, a Nashville artist and designer, who was staring at Hayes’ piano.

While the singer belted out his hit song “Wanted” from the Bridgestone Arena stage, Edmondson, who owns 615 Design, tried to envision how the piano looked on TV. She’d painted it with Hayes’ song lyrics before he joined Carrie Underwood on tour this fall and tweaked it specifically for the CMA Awards, adding more lyrics above the keys on the instrument’s faceplate.

“This was the first year that any of my work has been on the CMAs,” Edmonson said. “I had to make sure it looked good on camera.”

It takes about 460 workers, many of them Nashvillians, laboring for months leading up to the annual event and on show night. Producers of the three-hour broadcast rely on local set design firms, lighting companies and party rental operations.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) - Country stars Luke Bryan and The Band Perry's Kimberly Perry are ready to see a week's worth of hard work pay off when "CMA Music Festival: Country's Night to Rock" airs Monday on ABC.

They are co-hosts for the three-hour TV special, which highlights the biggest performances and behind-the-scenes moments of CMA Fest. It was filmed June 7-10 in Nashville, Tenn.

"There are so many amazing live performances, but also one of my favorite parts were the interviews Luke and I got to do," said Perry in a recent interview. "It's a peek backstage and into the personalities of some of your favorite artists, some of our favorite artists."

Brad Paisley gave Charlotte, N.C. a localized show studded with patriotism, humor and NASCAR on Friday night along with nearly two hours of hit after chart-topping hit. And in return, the amphitheater crowd showered the singer with excitement and levels of applause and adoration seldom seen from Nashville audiences.

Paisley kicked off the show with his latest single “Camouflage” and a visually stunning multimedia display that over the course of the evening incorporated photographs, lasers, 3-D images, holograms, and animation that was created by the singer.

He dedicated “Ticks” to “all the drunk people on the lawn” and then changed the words in the first verse to “I’d like to see the other half of your Dale Jr. tattoo” to reflect that Charlotte is situated in the heart of NASCAR country. The insertion of Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s name elicited even more cheering from the already amped up audience.

“It’s great to be in Charlotte tonight,” he told fans. “Welcome to the Virtual Reality Tour. The weekend is the start of all great things … football, the first weekend of the NASCAR chase. I named this tour Virtual Reality because country music is about reality but it can take you out of any reality and transport you but first you have to establish some ground rules.”

He struck the first notes of “This is Country Music” and the audience roared approval and sang along. When images of an American flag flying were shown on the screen and soldiers dressed in fatigues marched out on stage, a feeling of unity swept the amphitheater.
Paisley kept emotions running high in North Carolina with “Waiting on a Woman.” He played the music video featuring Andy Griffith in the background. The end of the song and video presentation included a tribute to Griffith, a resident of the state, who passed away earlier this summer.

Additional fan favorites included “She’s Everything,” “Online,” Then,” and “Letter to Me,” which Paisley performed from a satellite stage near the back of the seated area and introduced with a story.

“I think back to the little kid who dreamed (of this career) and who never thought he’d see a crowd half this big,” Paisley said. “I wish I could go back and show this to him when he needed to see it.”

Paisley closed his main set with “Old Alabama,” “Water,” and “Remind Me,” his duo with Carrie Underwood, the performance including a lifelike holographic version of the “Blown Away” singer.

But that was far from the only music fans got for their ticket price. While Paisley took the stage around 9 p.m., the show began in the parking lot on the Virtual Opry stage four hours before with Kristen Kelly who played new single “My Ex-Old Man” along with nearly 30 minutes of new material. Jana Kramer followed with her hit “Why Ya Wanna” and Love and Theft closed the stage with their newest No. 1 “Angel Eyes” and other fan favorites including “Runaway.”

Paisley brought all the acts back on stage for the last song of the encore: “Alcohol.” McCreery, The Band Perry, Kelly, Kramer, Love and Theft, and their bands and entourages poured on stage and many crowded around a bar set up on the corner of the stage for drinks while others sang and shook hands with fans. Kelly handed Paisley a beer bottle to double as a slide for his guitar and the show closed just as the event started six hours before – with fine country music and throngs of fans hungry for more.

“It’s an incredible experience to be in the studio alongside someone you’ve always looked up to and wanted to meet, much less had the chance to collaborate with on a record,” says Karen Fairchild of Little Big Town. “You put your headphones on and you sing your part and then that voice comes in ... It’s pure magic.”

Richie, who was born in Tuskegee, Ala., in 1949, says the project helped him to reconnect with his Southern roots. It also allowed him to revisit his well-established country flair. The genre is a familiar place for him: In 1980, Kenny Rogers had a hit with the Richie-penned “Lady”; Conway Twitty covered Richie’s group The Commodores’ hit “Three Times a Lady”; Richie crossed over to the country charts in 1984 with “Stuck on You”; and in 1987, Alabama teamed with Richie to make his song “Deep River Woman” a Top 10 country hit.

But Richie’s fondness for Nashville these days goes deeper. The singer walked into a localrecording studio to work on Tuskegee and immediately recognized players that contributed to his early recordings, including “Penny Lover” and “All Night Long (All Night).”

“I said, ‘I thought you had retired,’ ” recalls the singer, who has sold more than 100 million albums as a member of The Commodores and as a solo artist. One member responded, “No, I just moved to Nashville.”

Click to see a gallery of the Band Perry performing at the Ryman Auditorium on Feb. 20, 2012, in Nashville, Tenn. (Shelley Mays/The Tennessean)

The Band Perry christened Ryman Auditorium’s new Brazilian teak stage on Monday night with an 85-minute set that not only showed off their dexterity as singers, songwriters, and performers, but also gave the audience a solid sneak peek as to what they can expect on the trio’s next album.

In short: more hits.

The sibling trio kicked off the show, their first headlining local gig, with “End of Times,” which Kimberly Perry described before the show as “a big statement from the three of us.”

“I feel like musically it has progressed us to a new level while still embracing everything we were on the first album,” she said. “It’s a little bit of an eerie way to start the set, very Southern gothic.”

They followed up with their new down home country “Sweet Baby Love,” which got the crowd on its feet and then steered into more familiar territory with their first radio single “Hip to My Heart.”

“It’s going to be a bit of a musical narrative tonight,” Perry told the crowd. “We’re going to do a couple of medleys, deeper cuts on the album, but we also wanted tonight to be about the continuing story of The Band Perry.”

Other new songs included “It Burns for You,” which Perry said was a “new one for the lovers” and spotlights youngest brother Neil Perry on mandolin. “Back to Me Without You,” was a crowd favorite that might be the trio’s next single. “Jimmy” is a sassy up-tempo tune that showcases the siblings’ rock ‘n roll influences. “A Night Gone Wasted,” punctuated by a few lines from The Beatles’ “With a Little Help From My Friends,” features a bouncy vocal exchange between Neil and Kimberly and seems destined to be a light-hearted anthem among young adults.

The lineup for the show, which airs live on FOX, looks much like the top of the country music charts over the past 12 months and yet isn’t a duplicate of what fans have seen on every country awards show throughout 2011.

When producers for the American Country Awards started lacing their inaugural show together last year, they knew they had to offer something different to stand out. The plan: create a show that skews younger with nominations based on sales numbers, ticket sales, radio airplay and social networking statistics instead of votes cast by members of a music industry trade organization. Allow winners to be determined by fans, and schedule performances by acts who are hot at the moment and not predictable faces booked for ratings.

“You look at this show, and you have a band like Thompson Square who has multiple nominations because ultimately they had the biggest record of the year this year,” says Fletcher Foster, an artist manager and one of the show’s producers. “(Radio) is that combination of, ‘Yeah, they need the superstars to get people to tune in, but they need the hits.’ Our nominees reflect radio, and it gives us the opportunity to have our performances reflect that, also.”